Many commercial products are produced using chemical as well as biological processes. Pharmaceuticals, for example, are produced in commercial quantities using scaled-up reactors and other equipment. So-called biologics are drugs or other compounds that are produced or isolated from living entities such as cells or tissue. Biologics can be composed of proteins, nucleic acids, or complex combinations of these substances. They may even include living entities such as cells. In order to produce biologics on a commercial scale, sophisticated and expensive equipment is needed. In both pharmaceutical and biologics, for example, various processes need to occur before the final product is obtained. For example, in the case of biologics, cells may be grown in a growth chamber or the like and nutrients may need to be carefully modulated into the growth chamber. Waste products produced by cells may also have to be removed on a controlled basis from the fermentation chamber. As another example, biologic products produced by living cells or other organisms may need to be extracted and concentrated. This process may involve a variety of filtration and separation techniques.
Because there are a number of individual processes required to be produce the final product, various reactants, solutions, and washes are often pumped or otherwise transported to various subsystems using conduits and associated valves. This same organizational complexity may also be found in some commercial food and dairy applications. These systems may be quite cumbersome and organizationally complex due to the large numbers of conduits, valves, sensors, and the like that may be needed in such systems. Not only are these systems visually complex (e.g., resembling spaghetti) they also include many components that are required to be sterilized between uses to avoid cross-contamination issues. Indeed, the case of drug and biologic preparation, the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is becoming increasingly strict on cleaning, sterilization or bio-burden reduction procedures that are required for drug and pharmaceutical preparations. This is particularly of a concern because many of these products are often produced in batches which would require repeated cleaning, sterilization or bio-burden reduction activities on a variety of components.
More recently, disposable solutions have been proposed that utilize flexible (e.g., silicone) tubing during the manufacturing process. The flexible tubing may be discarded after use and replaced with new tubing, thereby avoiding the need to sterilize some or all of the equipment. While the use of flexible, disposable tubing provides advantages there is still the problem of managing the tubing and connected components within the overall system. As noted above, the process operations involved in pharmaceutical manufacturing and other bioprocess operations and the like are organizationally complex which require a number of different conduit segment lengths or runs that go between various components such as valves, sensors, filters, pumps, chromatography columns, elution columns, reactors, and the like. Without proper management (or even with organization) of the various tubing segments and associated process components, the system may still resemble spaghetti. Not only is this visually complex, there often are components within the system that may need to be to be adjusted, inspected, or changed-out. If there is poor organization of the system, this may interfere with the ability to properly and efficiently operate and maintain the manufacturing system. There thus is a need for a solution to better organize and manage tubing and process operations that are used in connection with pharmaceutical, bioprocess, and food/dairy manufacturing systems.